Eleanor Roosevelt
From Freepedia
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11 1884 – November 7 1962) was an American human rights activist, statesman, journalist, educator, author, diplomat and as the wife of President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt, the longest serving First Lady of the United States from 1933-1945. An active First Lady, she traveled around the United States promoting the New Deal and visited troops at the frontlines during World War II. She was a first-wave Feminist and an active supporter of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Mrs. Roosevelt was active in the formations of numerous institutions, most notably the United Nations, United Nations Association and Freedom House. She chaired the committee that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. President Harry S. Truman called her the First Lady of the World, in honor of her extensive travels to promote human rights.
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Early Life
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born at 56 West 37th St. in New York City, NY to Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Eleanor Hall and was the favorite niece of Theodore Roosevelt. Following her parents deaths, young Anna Eleanor was raised by her maternal grandmother, an emotionally cold woman, in an autocratic house. She was looked down upon by most of her family, presumably because of her plain looks and six foot tall frame. On St. Patrick's Day (17 March) 1905 she married Franklin D. Roosevelt; President Theodore Roosevelt took the place of his late brother in giving Eleanor's hand to her husband to be. Their marriage produced six children, Anna Eleanor, James, Franklin Delano Jr. (1909-1909), Elliott, Franklin Delano Jr. and John Aspinwall. . However their marriage almost split over sexual explorations outside marriage by FDR -- see Franklin Delano Roosevelt for more information. She also had a contentious relationship with her domineering mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who at 5'10" was only 2 inches shorter than Eleanor.
Eleanor and Franklin were fifth cousins, once removed. They descended from Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt who emigrated to New Amsterdam (Manhattan) from the Netherlands in the 1640s. His grandsons, Johannes and Jacobus, began the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, New York branches of the Roosevelt family. Eleanor is descended from the Johannes branch and Franklin is descended from the Jacobus branch.
Although she was still in her Uncle Teddy's good graces, Eleanor found herself at odds with his eldest daughter, Alice Roosevelt who was enraged that Eleanor not only snagged her cousin Franklin as a husband, but that Franklin, and now Eleanor, were members of the Democratic Party, which Alice viewed as an afront to Theodore Roosevelt's position as president. In the season prior to the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor, newspapers began reporting that Eleanor had more claim to good looks than any of the other Roosevelt cousins, angering Alice. Alice was also jealous because of TR's alleged favortism towards Eleanor because she was more "Rooseveltian" than Alice.
In 1928, Mrs. Roosevelt met Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, a White House correspondent. They would become close friends after Hickok conducted a series of interviews with Mrs. Roosevelt in 1932. For the rest of their lives they would be close friends, Hickok suggested the idea for what would eventually become Mrs. Roosevelt’s column My Day. Some of her writings in her column would later cause friction with the mandarin Francis Cardinal Spellman, who was ultimately forced to come to Eleanor's Hyde Park home to bury the hatchet.
After a few years away from Washington, Hickok returned and lived in the White House with the first family in 1940. Eleanor Roosevelt and Hickok maintained a personal correspondence in which Mrs. Roosevelt wrote to Hickok in 1933: "My Pictures are nearly all up & I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can't kiss you [in person] so I kiss your picture good night and good morning" and "Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.", These letters have become the source of a theory that claims Eleanor Roosevelt was bisexual, though many historians continue to debate this controversial claim. Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of one of Mrs. Roosevelt's most extensive biographies, made a well-documented argument for the theory in her work. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, has publicly disputed Cook's assessment that Mrs. Roosevelt was bisexual.
First Lady
In 1939, the opera singer Marian Anderson was refused permission to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington because of her skin color. Mrs. Roosevelt arranged for Anderson to perform from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to a live audience of 70,000, and a nationwide radio audience.
During Mr. Roosevelt's terms as President, Eleanor was very vocal about her support of the civil rights movement and African-American rights. However, her husband needed the support of Southern Democrats (notoriously racist) to advance other parts of his agenda. FDR therefore did not take on the cause of civil rights—one of the biggest stains on his legacy, along with Japanese internment and the court-packing scheme—and Eleanor became the connection to the African-American population and helped Mr. Roosevelt win a lot of their votes.
Mrs. Roosevelt opposed her husband's decision to sign Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the internment of 110,000 Japanese nationals and American citizens of Japanese descent in internment camps on the U.S. West Coast. In 1943 Mrs. Roosevelt, along with Wendell Willkie and other Americans concerned about the mounting threats to peace and democracy during World War II, established Freedom House.
Mrs. Roosevelt also accepted large amounts of money from her activities in advertising. The Pan-American Coffee Bureau, which was supported by tax revenues from eight foreign governments, paid Mrs. Roosevelt $1000 a week for advertising. When the State Department found out that the First Lady was being paid so handsomely by foreign governments they unsuccessfully tried to cancel the deal.
Life After the White House
Following the death of her husband in 1945, Mrs. Roosevelt continued to live on the Hyde Park Estate. However, she did so at Val-Kill, the house that her husband Franklin remodeled for her near the mainhouse. Originally built as a small furniture factory, Val-Kill afforded Eleanor with a level of privacy that she had wanted for many years. Here she entertained her circle of friends in informal gatherings. The site is now the home of the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill, dedicated to "Eleanor Roosevelt's belief that people can enhance the quality of their lives through purposeful action based on sensitive discourse among people of diverse perspectives focusing on the varied needs of society." Eleanor Roosevelt continued to galvanize the world with her statments, well into her 70's.
After World War II, she was instrumental along with John Peters Humphrey and others in formulating the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the night of December 10, 1948, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke on behalf of the Declaration calling it "the international Magna Carta of all mankind," and the Declaration was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly later that night.
In 1954 Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio campaigned against her son, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., in the New York Attorney General election and successfully defeated him. Mrs. Roosevelt held DeSapio responsible for her son's defeat and grew increasingly disgusted with his political conduct through the rest of the 1950s. Eventually, she would join with her old friends Herbert Lehman and Thomas Finletter to form the New York Committee for Democratic Voters, a group dedicated to enhancing the democratic process by opposing DeSapio's reincarnated Tammany. Eventually their efforts were successful, and in 1961 DeSapio was removed from power.
Mrs. Roosevelt was a close friend of Adlai Stevenson and was a strong supporter of his candidacies in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. When President Truman backed New York Governor W. Averell Harriman, who was a close associate of Carmine DeSapio, for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Roosevelt was disappointed but continued to support Stevenson who ultimately won the nomination. She backed Stevenson once again in 1960 but John F. Kennedy received the presidential nomination instead.
She was responsible for the establishment of the 2,800 acre (11 km2) Roosevelt Campobello International Park on Campobello Island, New Brunswick in 1964 following a gift of the Roosevelt summer estate to the Canadian and American governments.
Mrs. Roosevelt was an accomplished archer, and one of the first modern women to participate in the sport of bowhunting. Her exploits as a 20th-century Diana are well documented in the writings of her male bowhunting contemporaries Fred Bear, Howard Hill and Saxton Pope. A close personal friendship with J.E. Davis, editor of Ye Sylvan Archer, which was a popular bowhunting magazine of the time, led to an invitation to author several articles for that publication. Mrs. Roosevelt's tales of her hunting excursions were well received, though they did not serve to further the cause of women's liberation: in keeping with the chauvinistic standards of the time, Roosevelt's stories were published under the masculine pseudonym "Chuck Painton" to avoid offending the magazine's overwhelmingly male readership. One of Mrs. Roosevelt's prized trophies, the taking of which was immortalized in her poignant 1937 account Outwitting the Rompala Buck (Ye Sylvan Archer, v2), for many years graced the mantle above the fireplace in her husband Franklin's presidential library. It is now held as one of the organizing artifacts of the Community Forum Collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
After her death, her son Elliott Roosevelt wrote a series of best-selling fictional murder mysteries wherein she acted as a detective, helping the police solve the crime, while she was First Lady. They feature actual places and celebrities of the time.
Mrs. Roosevelt survived her husband by nearly 18 years. Eleanor Roosevelt developed bone marrow tuberculosis, recurring from a primary 1919 infection and died at her Manhattan apartment on the evening of November 7, 1962, at 78. Mrs. Roosevelt was buried next to Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park, New York on November 10, 1962.
She was the first honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
See also
| Preceded by: Lou Henry Hoover | First Lady of the United States 1933–1945 | Succeeded by: Bess Truman |
External links
- White House First Ladies' Gallery
- The Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill
- An 'Outing' of Historical Proportions- an article about E.R.'s possible bisexuality, by Cliff Arsen, a Gay rights activist who was friends with Mrs. Roosevelt during his childhood and adolescence.
Reference
- Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Da Capo Press ed., 1992, paperback, 439 pages, ISBN 03680476X, dacapopress.com
Further reading
- David B. Roosevelt, Grandmère: A Personal History of Eleanor Roosevelt, Warner Books, 2002, Hardcover, 256 pages, ISBN 0446527343
- Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II768 pages, ISBN: 0684804484
Categories: 1884 births | 1962 deaths | Autodidacts | Gay icons | Roosevelt | U.S. First Ladies | United Nations | Feminists | Dutch Americans
